National Intelligence Council - Global Trends - Archive

National Intelligence Council

Global Trends

National Intelligence Council - What's New

Thursday, April 12, 2012

National Intelligence Council

What's New

Body Content Starts Here

National Intelligence Council - What We Do

Monday, April 02, 2012

National Intelligence Council

What We Do

Within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the NIC carries out its mission under the direction of the Deputy Director for Intelligence Integration and the Chairman, Vice Chairman, and Counselor, who lead a corps of National Intelligence Officers.

The NIOs serve as the “analytic arm” of the National Intelligence Manager teams and are responsible for producing finished intelligence analysis.

They support the NIMs’ efforts to integrate US intelligence and develop and implement Unifying Intelligence Strategies to address the nation’s most pressing national security concerns.

Mission Areas

The NIC’s core missions are to:

The NIC promotes exemplary use of analytic tradecraft and standards, including alternative analysis, new analytic tools and techniques, and wider collaboration within the IC.

Provide senior policymakers with coordinated views of the entire Intelligence Community, including National Intelligence Estimates.

Prepare IC principals and represent the IC at National Security Council Principals and Deputies Committee meetings.

Tap non-USG experts in academia and the private sector to broaden the IC’s knowledge and perspectives.

Although most of the NIC’s work is classified, the NIC also produces or commissions unclassified reports, many of which can be found in the documents section of this page.

Global Trends

Every four years the NIC publishes an update of its Global Trends series that identifies key drivers and developments likely to shape world events a couple of decades into the future. The most recent Global Trends report, Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds was released on December 10, 2012.

The NIC CollectionIncludes hundreds of declassified National Intelligence Estimates and other publications produced by the NIC or its predecessor organizations, the Office of National Estimates and the Office of Reports and Estimates. The NIC database, housed within CIA's Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Electronic Reading Room, includes some 1100 documents that have been declassified and made available to the public, either partially or in their entirety, under FOIA. The earliest of these dates back to 1946; several were published as late as the 1990s. Additional items are being added regularly. Collectively, they constitute an important historical record of Intelligence Community analysis at the highest level; individually, many make for fascinating and instructive reading.

National Intelligence Council - Global Trends

Monday, April 02, 2012

National Intelligence Council

Global Trends

For nearly two decades, National Intelligence Council's Global Trends Report has been shaping strategic conversations within and beyond the US Government. In creating the report, the NIC engages expertise from outside government on factors of such as globalization, demography and the environment, producing a forward-looking document to aid policymakers in their long term planning on key issues of worldwide importance.

Since the first Global Trends was released in 1997, the audience for each report has expanded, generating more interest and reaching a broader audience that the one that preceded it.

A new Global Trends report is published every four years following the U.S. presidential election.

Global Trends 2035

Critical to its insight and policy-relevance have been meetings worldwide with a wide range of interlocutors—including government officials, scholars, business people, civil society representatives, and others—in workshops, exchanges, and other events designed to stimulate thinking about possible global trajectories and discontinuities over the next two decades.

Individuals from scores of countries and walks of life have helped the NIC examine trends—including economics, demography, ecology, energy, health, governance, security, identity, and geopolitics—and understand their implications for peace, security, and prosperity worldwide.

The NIC crystallizes ideas gleaned from these meetings as well as extensive research in a Global Trends report published every four years, between the US Presidential Election Day and Inauguration Day.

Who Reads Global Trends?

In December 2016, the US President-elect will receive Global Trends 2035, the sixth edition in the National Intelligence Council’s (NIC) series aimed at providing a framework for thinking about the future.

This time period affords the incoming or returning President and senior staff the opportunity to weigh the report’s judgments and lay the groundwork to address long-range issues of importance to national and global security.

The report also is publicly released, aiding policymakers, scholars, and others in many countries in better understanding possible trends and discontinuities in the global environment.

Join the Conversation

As the NIC prepares Global Trends 2035, it is consulting an increasingly diverse set of voices worldwide—both established and new—to help it question assumptions, identify new issues, and help conceptualize a framework that lays out in a cogent and understandable style the consequential trends and surprises that could occur in the next 20 years.

Some of the questions the NIC and its partners are exploring include:

Will power continue to diffuse or concentrate in the future?

To what extent will further advances in communications technology transform societies and the relationship between citizens and governments?

How will automation and robotics impact human employment and economies?

Which currently unresolved questions or uncertainties regarding society, economy, and politics are likely to be most game-changing through 2035?